[Sca-cooks] One of the original fruitcakes has beenadmitted to ;

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Edouard de Bruyerecourt:
>At home (i.e. not with me during holiday travel) I have a very late 19th
>century home encyclopaedia with a wedding cake recipe that very much looks
>like a recipe for fruitcake. I don't recall if it calls for just fruit,
>candying the fruit, or using candied fruit. I expect it might be a more
>digestible confection than modern commercial varieties. Althought it did
>occur to me that one of the banes of modern fruitcakes, that they don't 'go
>bad' (any more than they are) would be a boon to a wedding cake being saved
>for the first aniversary.
>
>Edouard

A fairly typical wedding cake and Christmas cake in the UK is (or 
used to be) some type of fruitcake, often covered with marzipan or 
almond paste, to sort of seal it all together, then covered with 
Royal Icing for the long haul. They do indeed keep a long time, but 
I'm not getting a sense that a homemade fruitcake has anything to be 
ashamed of. I think people have developed a distaste for the style 
which it has acquired over the centuries as a set of necessary 
storage criteria.

For example... rum in fruitcake? How barbarous! Everyone knows you're 
supposed to use whisky. Gummy candied citron peel = nastiness. But 
candied orange peel? Why not?

It's as if the decisions that have been made to make it keep a 
moderately long time (something it has in common with a fine cheese 
or bottle of wine, also items the unsophisticated routinely dislike 
at first contact, and a good fruitcake does age and change over time, 
too) are being held against it.

Personally, if I go to the grave never eating another fake cream-cake 
made from a Duncan-Hines mix again (and unfortunately this is what 
too many Americans think of when you say, "cake") , it'll be too soon.

I'm especially fond of the McCormick Irish Christmas Cake, which is 
basically a pound cake substrate with fruit and nuts, with the almond 
paste coating and the Royal Icing. McCormick offers the option of 
making the cake a month before serving and feeding it judiciously 
with booze every couple of days, but this is not mandatory for a 
successful cake (you would coat and ice it before serving, then).

Edouard, somewhere I have a British professional baker's vocational 
school textbook, written in the 1950's, and the recipe for a "bride 
cake" (presumably a wedding cake, which may or may not be 
complimented by a separate "groom cake") is pretty much the fruitcake 
you describe above, so the practice is old, but apparently still 
common as recently as 50 years ago, or less.

Adamantius